When companies acquire a new software application, they typically work with a vendor or systems integrator to incorporate that software application with the rest of the company's IT system. The quality of code implementations received from the systems integrator can vary widely, and so to ensure that they are receiving quality code, companies will often turn to code quality consultants to evaluate and recommend changes to their implementation. Code quality analysis can be performed manually or using a number of different analysis tools.
Code quality analysis tools provide a way for companies to analyze the quality of computer code they receive from their systems integrators. These tools can include static code quality analysis tools, which analyze code without executing it, and dynamic code quality analysis tools which analyze code at runtime. These tools can check for possible coding errors, inefficiencies, and other metrics based on a particular company's best practices or quality standards.
When a user runs one particular standard code quality analysis tool, the output provided is typically given in absolute values. For example, the tool will create a report that indicates there are 750 issues identified in the code. However, absolute values such as these are of limited use when evaluating the quality of a particular code implementation. In other words, absolute values alone, without context, do not indicate whether, for example, code having 750 issues is an example of good coding or bad coding.
Additionally, not all available code analysis quality tools provide the same quality checks. Therefore, to get a more comprehensive analysis of the quality of a given code project, multiple tools typically need to be separately utilized.